Showbiz Suburbia

Here is a brief outline of My Life In Show Business:

about a year and a half ago I wrote a sitcom, or the beginnings of a sitcom.  It was more of an idea on a couple of sheets of paper.  By June of 2006 I had an Oscar winning producer who loved the idea and started helping me develop the script.  By the end of the summer the first draft of the script was finished, but so were my funds.  I returned to the good old USA to make some more money and to film a pilot demo.  By January 2007 I was back in London and had meeting with the producer who liked the pilot demo. In fact she said she was surprised and delighted at how well it turned out. She then set up a meeting with a director.  In February me and the director met up at The Metropolitan in Westbourn Grove.  It was a sort of professional blind date.  You show me yours, I'll show you mine.  The director liked what he saw and wanted to direct the show, with the caveat that he did the casting. (I had hoped that I could play the lead character up to that point, but really, I have no acting experience, unless you count a lifetime of "acting as if" as experience, which does not really translate well on a resume.)  I then reworked the script and the delighted producer said she wanted me to be lead writer, so far she had me earmarked as creator.  Encouraged and now myself delighted I contacted a BAFTA (US equivalent of Emmy) winning writer who also loved the script and the pilot demo and wanted to be involved.  Next thing I know I am out of money again. Big Time. Then the director got a sweet gig on a mini-series with big name stars and was out of the loop for a while.  The producer cut me loose and I ended up back in the States wondering what happened to my dreams.  My friends in the business said this was par for the course.  But I just assumed that things would go like this:

1. Write script

2. Get 2 time Academy Award winning producer

3. Get director

4. Get BAFTA Award winning co-writer

5. Make TV show

6. Get famous

7. Field offers from Hollywood and the Beeb

8. Count money

9. Go to Cannes

10. Get free stuff

Right?

So I got to step four.  Only 6 more steps to go. Or do I have to star over?

I have started over in a way.  I am now working on a third draft of the script with the help of a seasoned Hollywood writer/producer who is the big sister of a childhood friend. She is mentoring me and helping me restructure the story.  As a friend. Which feels pretty good. No promises, no pressure.  Just goodwill. She says I have "a talent that cannot be learned or bought." It's enough to keep me going. More than enough, really.

Clearly I am not ready for The Big Time, but I am doing my creative press-ups to get in maximum mental and creative shape.   I feel like I am training for the Hollywood Olympics, and I'm going for gold.

Meanwhile I have a friggin' day job and have to get up at 4:30am so that I can write.  But that makes me like Nadia Comaneci, but without the specter of being bitch-slapped by the USS of R if I take the silver.  But not so fast.  I am stuck in Oklahoma City so that is my personal specter. Hooray for OKC. I am writing for my life.

If I have made to the suburbs of show business, Downtown can't be far away. Sure there will be traffic jams, a bit of gridlock, toll bridges to cross before I reach the Manhattan of my dreams.

Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!

I Am Sophistihickated

"I could really eat some brisket," said my friend Connie.

Now that is not a comment you hear just anywhere.  It is most often heard in the Southern States of the US of A. Oklahoma is in the Southwest, but it has a bit of a Southern twang about it. Part cowboy, part mid-west.  It's hard to explain unless you are here.

Brisket, for my UK audience is a skirt steak that is slowly roasted.  Slowly because this particular cut of beef is very stringy and chewy if not cooked slowly over a period of at least a day.  My mom uses Liquid Smoke to give it a sort of hickory flavor.  Others use the mesquite version.  Mostly Texans, though.  When cooked properly brisket melts in your mouth and is super tender.  It is, what I call a "hick" food.  But just because you eat or even like brisket does not make you a hick.  But it does perhaps point to one's hickey roots, as in the case of my family.  We are about 2-3 generations away from hick.  (My paternal great-grandfather was a cowboy and his wife was at one time the Sheriff of Johnson County, Wyoming while the men-folk were off fighting Indians in the Powder River War.) We are now mostly edumacated people.  

As for Connie, I don't know about her hick lineage.  She may be the granddaughter of the lost Tatiana for all I know. She has a couple of higher education degrees, has in fact just received a half million dollar grant, which she penned herself to create housing for HIV+ people.  Hicks usually don't like "queers" although some queers like brisket, but they might choose to call brisket "pot au feu." 

And then there is the whole Jewish side of the brisket.  They are not hicks.  I think Judaism, by its very nature precludes hickieness.  Yet I have met some pretty hickey Jews in Texas.

So what does that make us, those descendants of hicks who are all lettered up?  I believe it makes us sophistihicks.  We are sophitihickcated.

YouTube

Try as I might, I can't seem to get the  next video to compress properly.  I have tried all sorts of combinations.  Things like big endians and little endians. MPGs, dot mov's. I am awash in a sea of undecipherable acronyms. The first one, to the right, Weird Plankton was sort of a tease.  Like free dope from a drug dealer to get me hooked.  Now I'm having to pay.

I'm not sure I like the shift in the balance of power.

That's So Ironical

If I hear the misuse of this word one more time I think I'm going to scream. In the past I took umbrage when British people said that Americans don't understand irony. But now I am in complete agreement.  My mistake was in taking it personally and not recognizing that I am one of the exceptions to that generalization. 

  

It does not mean: funny, coincidental, surprising, although it may contain those elements.  And using the word incorrectly defeats the purpose of trying to make yourself sound smarterer.

*please note that this image is in no way related to the subject of this post.

Overshooting The Mark

Or maybe overachievement? I'm not really sure.

Anyhow, when I discovered this small 20th Century Oasis I thought: "life is full of surprises." I must have been in a good mood, because normally an unexpected burst of water directed at my face elicits a different response from me, to wit: "motherfucker" or something comparable that demonstrates my good breeding.

Speaking of surprises, I just had another one: about 4 years ago I got a letter from the Internal Revenue Service requesting that I pay them $53K. I did what any normal person would do, I stuck the envelope in the drawer and got on with LIFE! Eventually the persistence of memory was just too loud to be ignored and my head was feeling like Daliwood.

I decided I would try and do what grown-ups do, now that I am recognizing that I am one, and have been one for a while now, and the long and short of it is that I only owe the IRS   $4k and change. I could have kissed my accountant. But she is a grown up girl, what I believe is know as a  woman. She would never put an envelope like that in the drawer. I feel like I deserve some sort of award for being responsible. And I guess I got it. Thanks Sam.

Lisa's Hair Chalet

This remindes me that I need to get a hair cut. I don't feel reassured by the fact that this establishment has my name. And its not a chalet. It's a shop front on Main Steet in suburban Oklahoma City. Which is not Switzerland.

The Stockholm Syndrome

Day 235 of my captivity. Oklahoma City is my captor, and I am beginning to like being here. Somewhat. Life here is slow, I don’t have to be cool, in fact I am the coolest person I know here. But that's probably because I don't get out much. Yet, I am queen of cool. I don’t like that. There is no one to immitate or emmulate. I don’t want to get used to this, but for now it's perfect. The people are nice. I have a new job resizing photographs for a 1000 page catalogue of electronic components. Everything from speakers to little flibdob thingys. I create paths around each object delete the background and convert the images to eps files and CMYK color. If I were still in London I would have written colour. I miss London. I admit I am lonely here.

But Back to The Stockhom Syndrome. I was thinking about having a macchiato. A decaf macchiato. Has coffee become a sort of captor if I am having decaf? I wonder. I did not like coffee when I first tried it. It was bitter and made me buzzy. But now I have found decaf. And I look forward to its company. Whether I am in London or Oklahoma City I seek out Starbucks and order decaf.